Camera Lens Blur effect and camera depth of field properties in After Effects CS5.5

After Effects CS5.5 includes many improvements related to 3D cameras and depth-of-field blurs. It’s now much easier to get high-quality animated rack focus, bokeh, and other results that depend on selectively blurring items depending on their distance from a camera. It’s also a lot easier to set up and animate cameras.

Added new camera command for automatically creating a null-object layer and connecting it to a camera: Create Orbit Null.

Removed discrepancies in behaviors of Track Z Camera tool and Track XY Camera tool depending on whether they were activated directly from the Tools panel or by using the mouse buttons with the Unified Camera tool. In After Effects CS5, the behaviors differed with regard to the point of interest and zoom.

Chris and Trish Meyer provide a detailed set of video tutorials about these new features: